XPost: alt.conspiracy, alt.conspiracy.new-world-order   
   From: heheheh@heheheh.com   
      
   quintal wrote   
      
   > heheheh@heheheh.com says...   
   > > quintal wrote   
   > > > hitler was a socialist and a democrat.   
   > > >   
   > > >   
   > >   
   > > So says the coward Frenchman.   
   > >   
   > > No coward or a liar like a right winger, I always say.   
   >   
   > i'm not a right winger.   
   >   
      
   But you refuse to respond to the content of my post, so I win again.   
      
   Only a socialist Frenchman believes that Hitler was a socialist and a   
   democrat.   Your lack of education and inferior intelligence exposes you as an   
   imbecile.   
      
   You probably believe the crap written by that Socialist Jew Joah Goldberg that   
   calls Hitler a Liberal because he was sometimes a vegetarian.   More pap for   
   the gullible.   
      
   Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History   
      
   In his new book, Goldberg has decided to dream up fascists on the left   
   rather than acknowledge the fact that the real American fascists have   
   been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years.   
      
   David Neiwert | January 8, 2008 | web only   
      
      
   Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From   
   Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday, 496   
   pages)   
      
      
   * * *   
   The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents   
   has suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist   
   historians -- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field who   
   have attempted to recast the meaning of, respectively, the Holocaust   
   and the Japanese American internment. Their reach, however, has been   
   somewhat limited to fringe audiences.   
      
   It might be tempting to throw Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The   
   Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of   
   Meaning into those same cloacal backwaters, but there is an essential   
   difference that goes well beyond the likely much broader reach of   
   Goldberg's book, which was inexplicably published by a mainstream   
   house (Doubleday). Most revisionists are actually historians with some   
   credentials, and their theses often hinge on nuances and the   
   interpretation of details.   
      
   Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that   
   has enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in   
   absurdly broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just   
   history done badly, or mere revisionism. It's a caricature of reality,   
   like something from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro   
   history.   
      
   The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence:   
   Of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise   
   it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is   
   its overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-   
   Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in   
   ignorance. Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this   
   entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.   
      
   Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author   
   of 1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something   
   not desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the   
   word's meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers   
   to Orwell's critique as his "definition of fascism."   
      
   And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself   
   considers undesirable as "fascist." This is just about everything even   
   remotely and vaguely thought of as "liberal": vegetarianism, Social   
   Security, multiculturalism, the "war on poverty," "the politics of   
   meaning." The figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson   
   and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton.   
   Goldberg's primary achievement is to rob the word of all meaning --   
   Newspeak incarnate.   
      
   The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public   
   understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree   
   on a definition, as Goldberg observes -- and he makes use of that   
   confusion to ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever   
   providing readers with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's   
   quip.   
      
   Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia   
   regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many   
   regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain   
   ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its   
   populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully   
   groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the   
   true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what   
   Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that   
   is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity   
   in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has   
   historically always been vigorously -- no, viciously -- anti-liberal.   
      
   So when Goldberg proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of   
   the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our   
   collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more   
   thorough observers of history might instead just shake their heads.   
   After all, the facts of Mussolini's utopian/socialist origins and the   
   Nazis' similar appeals to socialism by incorporating the name are   
   already quite well known to the same historians who consistently   
   describe fascism as a right-wing enterprise.   
      
   What these historians record -- but Goldberg variously ignores or   
   minimizes -- is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in   
   fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered   
   "socialist" support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and   
   that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open   
   antipathy to all things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of   
   Mein Kampf are devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war   
   against "the Left," and not merely the Marxism that Goldberg   
   acknowledges was a major focus of Hitler's animus.   
      
   This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi   
   transformations from a faction of street thugs into an actual   
   political power that seized the reins of government, when fascists   
   gradually shed all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became   
   violently anti-socialist and anti-communist. But it was present all   
   along; "the Left" were the people who were beaten and murdered in the   
   1920s by the squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans   
   sent off to Nazi concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but   
   socialists, communists, and other left-wing political prisoners,   
   including "liberal" priests and clerics.   
      
   The same incoherence underlies what Goldberg imagines is his   
   provocative thesis: the notion that "modern progressivism and   
   classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots," and therefore   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)